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Following swiftly on the heels of a Thanksgiving that broke records with $4.2 billion in online sales, Black Friday also hit a new high, although it just fell short of predictions. According to analytics from Adobe , consumers spent $7.4 billion online yesterday buying goods online via computers, tablets and smartphones. The figures were up by $1.2 billion on Black Friday 2018 , but they actually fell short of Adobe’s prediction for the day, which was $7.5 billion. Salesforce, meanwhile, said that its checks revealed $7.2 billion in sales (even further off the forecast). Popular products included toys on the themes of Frozen 2, L.O.L Surprise, and Paw Patrol. Best selling video games included FIFA 20, Madden 20, and Nintendo Switch. And top electronics, meanwhile, included Apple Laptops, Airpods, and Samsung TVs. A full $2.9 billion of Black Friday sales happened on smartphones. These conversions are growing faster than online shopping overall, so we are now approaching a tipping po...

Ockam , a two-year-old, Bay Area-based company that’s selling tools to developers so they can establish an “architecture for trust” within their connected device applications, has raised $3.2 million in seed funding, including from Core Ventures, Okta Ventures, SGH Capital, and Future Ventures. This serverless platform for IoT development is being led by CEO Matthew Gregory and CTO Mrinal Wadhwa, two cofounders with noteworthy backgrounds. Before launching Ockam in the fall of 2017, Gregory was an “intrapreneur” at Microsoft, where he says he helped lead Azure’s pivot into open source software and container services. He also spent a couple of years at Salesforce as a product manager and, interestingly, spent a few years years ago as a system engineer working for Stars & Stripes, a syndicate of the yacht-racing competition America’s Cup where he tells us he led an engineering effort to build custom systems of sensors, analytics software and wireless communications tools needed to ...

Storm Ventures , a now 19-year-old, Sand Hill Road venture firm in Menlo Park, Ca., has closed on $130.4 million, shows a new SEC filing . The outfit began its fundraising late last year, according to an earlier filing. It had closed its previous fund with $180 million in 2015. Storm distinguishes itself in numerous ways, including its exclusive focus on seed and Series A stage enterprise startups, including mobile, SaaS and cloud infrastructure companies. The partners also have a penchant for helping far-flung startups grow their footprint around the world. Tae Hea Nahm, for example, a founding managing director of the firm (and cofounder of four mobile companies before that, including Airespace and MobileIron ), was born in Seoul and has told us in the past that he spends a considerable amount of time in South Korea to attend startup board meetings, as well as to visit with Samsung and others of Storm’s LPs, which includes Korea Telecom. Ryan Floyd, another of the firm’s cofoun...

Facebook added a correction notice to a post by a fringe news site that Singapore’s government said contained false information. It’s the first time the government has tried to enforce a new law against ‘fake news’ outside its borders. The post by fringe news site States Times Review (STR), contained “scurrilous accusations” according to the Singapore government. The States Times Review post contained accusations about the arrest of an alleged whistleblower and election-rigging. Singapore authorities had previously ordered STR editor Alex Tan to correct the post but the Australian citizen said he would “not comply with any order from a foreign government”. Mr Tan, who was born in Singapore, said he was an Australian citizen living in Australia and was not subject to the law. In a follow-up post, he said he would “defy and resist every unjust law”. He also posted the article on Twitter, LinkedIn and Google Docs and challenged the government to order corrections there as well. On t...

Since it’s a holiday week for those of us in the United States, we’ve put together an (even more) unstructured episode of the Original Content podcast . Among other things, this gives us a chance to update our initial review of “The Mandalorian” by acknowledging the Disney+ show’s breakout character, known unofficially as Baby Yoda — maybe that counts as a spoiler, but he’s all over social media already, and he’s even the subject of new Disney merchandise that seems to have been rushed into production . Beyond our “Mandalorian” catch-up, Star Wars comes up again during our discussion of things from the streaming and entertainment world that we’re thankful for. Despite some behind-the-scenes turmoil, the Disney era at Lucasfilm has brought us some delightful films, particularly “The Force Awakens” and “The Last Jedi.” It might seem kind of redundant to praise two of the most commercially successful films of all time , but it’s also an opportunity to address the online backlash and c...

As the Holiday Season approaches, new jobs for players in the tech ecosystem beckon. And this is no less true for investors. Two notable moves have recently happened that are worthy of note in the European scene. The first is that GR Capital , a pan-European VC, is opening an office in London and has lured Jason Ball , who, earlier this year, left Qualcomm Ventures where had been European Managing Director for over a decade. Bad spent ten years as a mentor at Seedcamp and individually invested in more than ten companies. He was understood to be looking for new challenges, either building a new fund or joining another – so now we have our answer as to what he decided. Founded in 2016 by Roma Ivaniuk in Ukraine, GR Capital specializes in late-stage VC investments. It has over $70M under management and has invested in Lime, Azimo, WeFox, McMakler, Glovo and Meero among others. The fund has traditionally been known for investing in Eastern Europe, but with a London office and the extreme...

Hello and welcome back to Startups Weekly, a weekend newsletter that dives into the week’s noteworthy startups and venture capital news. Before I jump into today’s topic, let’s catch up a bit. Last week, I wrote about Airbnb’s issues . Before that, I noted Uber’s new “money” team . Remember, you can send me tips, suggestions and feedback to kate.clark@techcrunch.com or on Twitter  @KateClarkTweets . If you’re new, you can subscribe to Startups Weekly here . China’s pivot to Africa Three African fintech startups; OPay , PalmPay and East African trucking logistics company Lori Systems , closed large fundraises this year. On their own, the deals aren’t particularly notable, but together, they expose a new trend within the African startup ecosystem. This year, those three companies brought in a total of $240 million in venture capital funding from 15 different Chinese investors, who’ve become increasingly active in Africa’s tech scene. TechCrunch reporter Jake Bright , who...